I am a helicopter mom. You bet I am. As the mother of a profoundly autistic man, I have to be. Micromanaging is my life. And because my son Nat is highly vulnerable, I will be that way until I die.

Every day, even though Nat does not live with me, and even though he has a truly remarkable group home and day program, a part of me is always circling around him, like smoke from a smouldering fire. These days, because he has excellent house staff, warm and kind housemates, and a lot of eyes on him, my worries tend to be small, but there is always a residue of anxiety in my throat. Nat’s vulnerability appears in both expected and surprising ways, so I never really know complete peace of mind.

My way of managing my nerves about Nat is to anticipate trouble and prevent it. My husband, Ned, is often troubled by that because he believes that I don’t give Nat enough credit for being able to advocate for himself or keep calm. But unlike my husband, my trauma from the earliest days of Nat’s vulnerability has not healed. I have learned that there are so many tiny links in the chain that keep Nat on track, and that they must connect together perfectly for him to be okay. Even though there are so many people in his life who come together to give him care and support, any one blip can blow the entire circuit.

There have been nightmarish moments, where he could have died that were no one’s fault, but that happened because of life’s unpredictability. Because there are just too many links that have to be strong. There was the time we were having dinner at a friend’s house, and suddenly there he was, climbing in through the dining room window. We had not even had time to realize he had gone outside before he came back to us.

“But think about it, Sue,” my husband would say (I don’t have his precise wording, it was so long ago, but I believe I have captured the spirit of these conversations), “he must have pushed open the back door, gotten locked out, and wandered all the way around the block to get to the front of the apartment building.”

“Yes,” I would say. “It is so horrible I can’t bear it.”

“But,” my husband Ned would say, “he managed to figure out how to be safe and how to find the house *and *to get back inside. That is extraordinary.”

“It is terrible that this happened.”

And then there was the time he was around 10, and the school van dropped him off at the wrong school. Nat, who is often nonverbal, was found wandering the halls. Luckily, a speech therapist recognized him from the other school and was able to get him to the right place.

“But,” my husband would say, “the speech teacher heard him whispering something, and realized that he was whispering the name of his school over and over again. He played a part in saving himself.”

Or the time when he was around 15, during a Boston University hockey game, and his social group stopped for some reason, and Nat just kept walking. And Nat is a really fast walker, so in that short space of time, no one noticed him moving on. I got the call from the group leader, and here I am giving you the exact words because I will never forget them, or the frozen boulder of fear in my stomach: “At this point in time, we cannot locate Nat.”

“But remember,” Ned would say, “he had actually gone outside directly to the van because that is where they were all headed. That’s where they found him. He had done the right thing.”

“But think what could have happened,” I would say.

It is things like this, or the phone call I got from him a month or so ago, where he was screaming because he got confused by his schedule.

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“But,” says Ned, “he was able eventually to find the one word that explained it.” [Nat had finally been able to say, “Sunday,” and I realized that he was asking why he wasn’t visiting us on Saturday, his usual day.]

“Yes, but,” I counter, “when I’m no longer here—”

“There are other people who know him. Other people who know what to do. There always have been.”

“But what if—”

“And more to the point,” Ned says, “Nat, in his own unique way, was able to do the right thing. Yes, he depends on other people for many things, but he has learned so much.”

Someday, perhaps, I will be able to bundle together all of those happy outcomes and breathe them in like a beautiful bouquet. Someday I may be able to land this helicopter I hover over Nat in. Someday I might finally know that risk and luck—both good and bad—are a part of every life and that somehow we still manage to be okay. Someday, I might be able to actually hear Ned when he says, “Maybe you can trust Nat now. And hope for the best.”

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Because in the end, that is all any of us can do.